Thursday, January 31, 2008

Fatal Frame Wii

Regular readers of this space know that I believe Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly -Director's Cut is the most frightening game ever made.

Not "scary." Frightening.

I've also mentioned that I've been playing No More Heroes, and while I'll write about it in depth on Monday, I will briefly say here that it is astoundingly fun and has one of the strongest senses of style I've ever seen.

The developer of No More Heroes is Grasshopper Manufacture, who you might remember as the developer of Killer7, a Gamecube title (also with a remarkable sense of style) that had one of the most extreme review score skews in history (of 57 reviews at MetaCritic, 8 were 50 or below, and 9 were 90 or above).

The CEO of Grasshopper Manufacture is Goichi Suda, or "Suda 51." He has one of the most unique backgrounds in gaming, because at the time he was originally hired by Human Entertainment, he was working as an undertaker.

That's according to his Wikipedia entry, anyway, which you can read here.

Yesterday, it was announced that the next installment of the Fatal Frame series is being developed for the Wii. The developer? Grasshopper Manufacture.

That's the equivalent of someone baking me the perfect pumpkin pie, then as it's cooling, a tanker truck full of Cool Whip pulls up into the driveway.

Here's something else, and I haven't heard anyone mention it. In 2004, Grasshopper Manufacture made a game (that was only released in Europe and Japan) titled Michigan: Report From Hell. It was a survival horror game with a first-person perspective, and that perspective was seen through the lense of a television camera.

In other words, a perfect match with the first-person mode of the Xbox version of FFII, where a camera was your only weapon.

By the way, here's the Wikipedia entry for Michigan, and based on the description, I seriously regret that it wasn't released in the U.S.